Litigation

Obama?s Drive for Diverse U.S. Bench is Slowed

By Peter Hardin

There’s a bump in the road for President Obama’s record-breaking push to place minorities and women on the federal bench.  The obstacle is a sharply polarized confirmation process in the Senate.

“Seven out of 10 Obama court nominees are non-traditional,” that is to say they are not Caucasian men, said political science professor Sheldon Goldman of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, quoted in an article in USA Today. Almost half have been women, one-quarter African American, 10 percent Hispanic and 11 percent Asian American.

But Obama’s drive to halt a rightward march of the federal courts and to add greater diversity has been complicated, this thorough and well-researched article reports:

“During his first 18 months in office, his administration has been thwarted by unprecedented delays. The situation, which has received little notice against the backdrop of a pending Supreme Court nomination and the administration’s complex legislative agenda, could undercut Obama’s effort to significantly infuse the federal courts with more women and minorities.”

When the confirmation process gets more combative, there is a disproportionate impact on the minority and female nominees. The low for current times that the confirmation rate has reached in the past 18 months, according to Goldman, is 37 percent for Obama’s district court choices and 47 percent of his appeals court judges.

These confirmation delays could set back diversity on some courts, said Carlos Ortiz, Hispanic National Bar Association past president, since a number of sitting minority judges are reaching retirement age now. Ortiz described diversity on the bench as important not only symbolically but substantively, since minorities are more likely to be part of the criminal justice system.

To learn more about the importance of diversity on the bench, see Justice at Stake’s issues page on the topic.

Full post as published by The Gavel on June 16, 2010 (boomark / email).